I think the article title is a big provocative and is drawing attention away from the main point: composable tools are better (in the long run) than contextual ones. Maven (and Ant) are contextual tools and they give a lot of benefits early on. Extending their use beyond simple things tends to become difficult and makes very messy build/deploy code.
Tools like Rake and Gradle (and Buildr) are more like thin wrappers on a turing complete language and are able to stretch and bend to fit the problem. Sure, that makes them harder to get started with, but it provides much more runway when the build gets complicated.
I've used Maven in the past on some projects and it starts off very nicely. However, without fail, I end up with some part of the build that doesn't work quite right. Or throws unresolvable errors. Or just fails, some of the time. I guess I (and everyone I've ever worked with) sucks at Maven and just can't make it work. If so, that tells me much more about Maven than my team's abilities.
P.S. I (mostly) blame XML for my Mavin chagrin. Over the years I've grown to hate XML and everything associated with it. It should burn in a fiery pit of lava. But that's just me. :)
Tools like Rake and Gradle (and Buildr) are more like thin wrappers on a turing complete language and are able to stretch and bend to fit the problem. Sure, that makes them harder to get started with, but it provides much more runway when the build gets complicated.
I've used Maven in the past on some projects and it starts off very nicely. However, without fail, I end up with some part of the build that doesn't work quite right. Or throws unresolvable errors. Or just fails, some of the time. I guess I (and everyone I've ever worked with) sucks at Maven and just can't make it work. If so, that tells me much more about Maven than my team's abilities.
P.S. I (mostly) blame XML for my Mavin chagrin. Over the years I've grown to hate XML and everything associated with it. It should burn in a fiery pit of lava. But that's just me. :)